Winning MasterChef is the easy bit — now comes the real test

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As the BBC show launches its first pop-up, former winners reveal their struggle to make it in the restaurant industry

“It’s all a bit crazy. Very crazy. And still unreal,” says Ping Coombes,
MasterChef champion 2014. Though technically Coombes won the title back in
January with her “techno tropical” Malaysian dishes, the show’s five million
viewers got to see it happen only when it was broadcast last Friday. A week
ago, Coombes, 33, was leading a quiet life in Bath as full-time mother to
Alexa, her 18-month-old daughter. Now she’s leaving the house at 6am, a PR
at her side, gliding between TV studios up and down the country — breakfast
news, This Morning, The One Show — squeezing in phone
interviews